Speculative histories, landscapes and instruments, and Latin American landscape architecture

Sunday, February 26, 2012

The Denny Regrade

["spite mounds" created by the Denny Regrade project in Seattle, 1904-1931; note the jet hose in the center of the picture blasting away at the mound on the right and all of the ladders and sluice tunnels at the bottom of the photo, with a person holding it for scale; the Denny Regrade is just one of the many "geological slurry" events in the seismically active, glacially scoured landscape of the American Pacific Northwest]

The
latest installment of the “Advancing Deltas” research is up over on Free Association Design. There Brett Milligan gives a fascinatingly
detailed chronicle of the large-scale movement of sediment from the former
reservoir behind the now-breached Condit Dam on the White Salmon River to the
much larger Bonneville Dam on the Colombia River. The tale is an actor-network-history of the breach,
one in which the scientists and engineers have the ability to mobilize huge
quantities of sediments yet are thwarted in their attempts to even monitor
certain aspects of the “compiled torpor… suddenly jettisoned across landscapes
like a geological slurry.”

Towards
the end of the account Milligan questions whether previous engineering notions
of systems thinking and their concomitant reductionist tendency and focus on
control would allow for the conceptualization of interventions such as the
Condit Dam project. He rightly points
out that with the current project a measure of control is still present, though
in “new and expanded forms. Here we are
subject to the forces of water and the enigmatic behavior of huge repressed
swarms of particles.”

Lured
by this event and Milligan’s a-n-t account we couldn’t help digging into a few
other instances of these historical “geological slurry” events in the Pacific
Northwest for a bit of context and comparison.
In 1894 the largest meteorological flood in the history of the Columbia occurred. At the town of The Dalles peak discharge was
measured at 35,100 cubic meters per second, enough to cover a football field in
25 feet of water every second. By contrast, the highest peak discharge
recorded on Europe’s largest river, the Danube, was 15,900 cubic meters per
second, the peak discharge on the Mississippi during the Flood of 1926 was over
70,000 cubic meters per second. The
flood wiped out the old fort and an adjacent small town just north of where the
Bonneville Dam is now located. These
were both 19th century constructions that had sprung up to control
the portage around the cascades on the Colombia River. Those cascades were the material remnant of
another, much larger event.

Perusing
the USGS circular on the largest floods in history shows this 1894 flood to be
only one tenth the size of the flood of 1450 caused by the breaching of the
“Bridge of the God’s” earthen dam. The
dam was created earlier when the southern faces of Greenleaf Peak and Table
Mountain were sent hurtling into the Columbia River Gorge by the Bonneville landslide. The event created a
stillwater reservoir behind the dam for some 100 miles that reorganized the
settlement patterns of the Klickitat and Chinook living in the area and drowned
forests for 35 miles east of the dam.
When the dam broke due to the water pressure and seismic activity, the
result must have been something like that flood on Alkali Lake that almost
drowned the X-men and turned Gene Grey into the Phoenix. The remnant was the Cascades.

[a google earth image of the Bonneville landslide area on the Columbia River; the fort and town of Little Cascade that was wiped out in the flood of 1894 was built along the portage road which cut through the area labeled "Bonneville Landslide"; the landslide was caused by sloughing off of the southern half of Greenleaf Peak and Table Mountain and resulted in a huge earthen dam on the Columbia; today the course of the river is more than 1 mile to the south and the cascade near the Bonneville Dam, in addition to the massive escarpments on what remains of the mountains]

The Denny Regrade

Lest
we think, however, that the geologic history of the Pacific Northwest is merely
some romantic transcendentalist tale of the power of nature and the pitifulness
of humans, the boomtown of circa-1900 Seattle offers us the Denny Regrade project. Undertaken as part of a
sweeping public works agenda to boost real estate values and reconfigure the
town into a major population center, the Denny Regrade was nothing less than
the sluicing of an entire hill into Elliot Bay.

Blasting
away at 16 million cubic yards of earth with 20,000,000 gallons of water per day and running it downhill into the bay was
of course met with a certain resistance.
For one, the crumbled geology itself proved difficult. The hills of Seattle were depositional sediments
formed when glaciers receded and the variegation and size of some of the sediments
required the mobilization of a wealth of instruments- sluices, tunnels, conveyor belts,
horse drawn tractors and wagons, power shovels, short-track railroads, and scows with specially designed seacocks were all put to use
as the project progressed over the next three decades. In addition, the property rights of certain
residents who refused to budge meant that their houses were left standing like
the sweet old man in “Up” while the grading went on around them. These contested actions left the intrepid
residents stranded 100 feet in the air until these “spite mounds”, as they were
known, eventually succumbed and Virgil Bogue was brought in to provide his vision for the future city. It was an
insane and wildly ambitious project, and even though the geological material
was corralled, the Bogue Plan was soundly defeated and the visions for a new
downtown and real estate bonanza never came to fruition.

The
picture rendered through actor-network-theory is less one of a great battle
with humans on one side and nature on the other, the two clashing heroically
together atop their trusty steeds on Battlefield Earth, and more a kindergarten
playground with shifting allegiances, unfair bullying, promiscuous flirtation
and pants-wetting, all in a short half-hour.
The “Advancing Deltas” research is an exciting new chapter in this
story. When seen in this broader context
one of the issues that the research project surfaces is that of the agency of
things, be they Pliocene-era geologic formations, Chinook settlement patterns,
white salmon, homeowners in Seattle, or the best-laid plans of internationally
renowned designers. More specifically,
it calls our attention to issues of agency and intentionality, and the liminal
space created by the difference between the two.

[the fate of the Denny Hill; an actor network history might trace those individual sediment particles down to Elliot Bay to check in on how they gave rise to new docklands or strip malls]